Ghosts of the Night
by Katja Deutsch
Summary: One night, in bed next to his beloved wife, Harry reflects on the past, as sparked by a horrible nightmare.


**Ghosts of the Night  
**

He stared down at his tiny son. A curly mop of black hair capped his porcelain forehead. Little wrinkles furrowed around his eyelids, closed in sweet, pure sleep. His tiny nose and button mouth couldn't be more perfect. The man walked from the basinet across the room to the bed, and laid himself back down next to his beautiful wife. Those dreams had been coming back again, keeping him awake, too afraid of them to close his eyes.

_He was there again on the battlefield. Fallen bodies lie around him – friends, enemies – he'd lost count. He only cared about two things: Voldemort, and Hermione. Hermione was easy; because their marriage had brought pregnancy to her, she had promised to stay off the battlefield and take care of herself. Voldemort, on the other hand, was much harder. No simple _Avada Kedavra_ would do it, and no one but Harry could kill him. Harry, with the conflicting magics of Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin coursing through his veins. Gryffindor came from his father; Slytherin, from the very man he was about to destroy. He traced his finger down his scar, reminding himself one final time of why he was here._

"_Riddle, I challenge you! I call on the magics of Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin, and with this I challenge you! I invoke the link you forged between us, and with this I challenge you! I remember the love of James and Lily Potter, Sirius Black, and Albus Dumbledore, and with this I challenge you! Come to me, face me!"_

_It worked, just as Remus had said it would. All other thoughts flew to the back of his mind as the things the two of them shared drew him and Voldemort together. His only hope now was that the love of those Voldemort had killed would protect him and give him strength. He had destroyed all of Riddle's Horcruxes, now he had to destroy the soul left in Riddle himself. _

_"_Saugen Sie!_" An old Germanic spell Minerva had found to suck out Voldemort's remaining soul. One merely had to say the incantation and think of what one wanted to draw out. He saw that it was working: time slowed as the fragmented ghost of Voldemort's soul separated from his body._

_"_Zerstören Sie!_" A similar spell, from the same volume, this one designed to destroy, rather than draw out. Without warning other than the spell, Voldemort's soul shattered like glass, then the shards simply evaporated._

_Elation coursed through Harry. Voldemort was destroyed, and the order would finish rounding up the remaining Death Eaters. His thoughts turned immediately to Hermione, as he ran off to find her, to celebrate the life they had before them with her, to have just a moment before mourning the many lives lost._

_As he ran toward the edge of the field, a group of people still engaged in a fight to the death caught his eye. It unsettled him – they were supposed to be mopping up now, everyone was supposed to be done fighting. As he grew closer, he could see Bellatrix Lestrange a little separate from the group, dueling with someone that looked almost like Hermione. But it couldn't be Hermione, she had promised to stay away from all the fighting. Just as he grew close enough to see that it was her, a jet of green light burst from Bellatrix's wand. _

"_No!" he cried, and hit her in the back with a killing curse of his own, suddenly finding sufficient hatred within him to kill. Tears streaming down his face, he ran to Hermione. She was most certainly dead, and the young life inside her, too tiny to survive on its own, died with her. He threw his head back, howled  
_

and woke up. He was covered in sweat from the dream, so vividly like that day, their last in the wizarding world, but with a heartwrenchingly different ending. It was the one thing left from that world, this nightmare come back to haunt him. Really, he reminded himself, Hermione had had nothing to do with the battle, thank God, and their son, Ronald James Potter, named for a beloved friend and unknown father, both of whom had perished in the fight against the Dark, was born a beautiful, perfect little boy. That is not to say that they had not been scarred by that day. Many friends had died fighting, and the death of Minerva McGonagall had sealed the fate of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry forever. Some families had decided to send their children to schools far away, some to hire private tutors, and still others to leave the wizarding world all together.

Harry put his arm around his sleeping wife. They had decided as soon as they knew of her pregnancy that any child of theirs in the wizarding world would be expected to be great – the child of Hermione Potter, nee Granger, and Harry Potter could be nothing less than a genius, of course – even before it was born, and neither of them wanted that for any child.

So it was that the greatest witch and wizard of their generation disappeared without warning, farewell, or trace on the greatest day in modern history. They had already found a house in Godric's Hollow, of all places, where they could raise little Ron without magic touching his life. Glancing toward his son one last time, Harry drifted into a blissfully dreamless sleep fro the rest of the night.

"Harry, your son is calling you," Hermione grumbled softly.

"Don't you remember, he's your son before dawn," he chided back, borrowing a line from one of their favorite children's movies.

Hermione roused herself and picked him up, comforting him in a way only a mother can. "He really is a perfect mix of the two of us," she remarked. "He has your eyes, though." She brought Ron into the bed with her, and the three of them lied there together, the ghosts of nighttime banished by family and love for another day.


End file.
